There are more than 50,000 WordPress plugins in WordPress official plugin directory and thousands more on third-party websites. It can make it difficult to pick up the best plugins to help improve your WordPress website. Picking the right one is essential to your website’s security, speed and user-friendliness. However, you do not need to install all of the plugins you find on the internet. Just a few good ones should be enough to improve your website’s aesthetics and functionality.
Here is a list of the top 10 essential WordPress Plugins that you should check out.
Rank Math – SEO
Rank Math is an SEO plugin that gives you access to the best on-page SEO tools to help improve your website’s SEO and get more traffic. What makes this plugin so useful is that it brings the power of multiple SEO plugins into one easy-to-use plugin. You can manage the SEO of your products, posts, blog, and all other taxonomies. You can also find critical information about your website right in the admin dashboard, such as the rankings for different keywords, internal linking suggestions, search impressions of your website, different errors Google sees and many more. You also get complete Google Schema Markup support for all types of snippets.
WP Rocket – Caching
WP Rocket is among the best WordPress caching plugin you will find in the market. Even if you have no technical skills, this plugin can help you improve the speed of your website. This plugin will automatically turn on caching settings such as page cache, gzip compression, and cache pre-loading when installed. There are also options to turn on additional features such as minification, CDN support, lazy loading images, DNS pre-fetching and others to help increase your website’s loading time. Instead of waiting for someone to request a page, this plugin will automatically crawl and build the cache, giving your website an instant boost. While this is one of the most user-friendly caching plugins, you will need to pay to be able to use it.
Imagify – Image Optimization
You want to upload high-quality and beautiful images on your website to keep your visitors engaged. But these images have large sizes and can slow down your website. Imagify plugin helps you eliminate the problem and compress the size of the images on your website. This easy-to-use plugin allows you to choose from three different compression levels to ensure you get the right quality image. You can also turn on the automatic feature that will optimize the images when uploading or backing up. Imagify supports all popular image formats.
Drift – Live Chat
If your visitors are leaving your website without doing anything, adding live chat can help you get customers’ insight, more conversions and increased sales. Drift is a live chat plugin focused more on generating sales than just providing customer support. Drift offers a wide range of features allowing you to interact with your visitors in real-time, get feedback, learn more about them and close deals. Some of the things you can do with this plugin include chat via a web dashboard or mobile apps, customize chatbox design, create automatic sales sequence, chatbot, book meetings via chat, and more.
Bloom – Popup Builder
Built by Elegant Themes, Blooms allow you to build attractive WordPress popup forms from your WordPress dashboard. You can choose from hundreds of templates and several display types to easily create email optin forms without starting from scratch. The plugin allows you to trigger the popup when readers reach different locations, such as after a comment, at the bottom of a post, after making a purchase or after inactivity.
Monarch – Social Sharing
Another great plugin by Elegant Theme, Monarch, is a popular social media plugin. This mobile-friendly plugin offers multiple social media share and follows buttons that can be displayed in different locations and over 35 different networks. Unlike other social sharing plugins, Monarch takes optimization options to the next level. It also provides additional features like statistics for social media shares, import/export module and more.
LearnDash – LMS Plugin
LearnDash is one of the best LMS plugins, which comes loaded with some powerful features. The plugin allows you to create multilayer courses with different categories, topics, lessons, quizzes and more. You can easily deliver the lessons all at once or schedule them over a period of time. You can also give assignments to users and then approve and comment on them. The plugin comes with plenty of monetization options such as one-time purchase, subscriptions, memberships and a shopping cart for your online course. The plugin also allows you to accept payment through several payment gateways like 2Checkout, PayPal and Striple.
UpdraftPlus – Backup
If your website gets hacked, the server crashes or something goes wrong with an update; you need to ensure you have a backup so you do not lose everything. UpdraftPlus is the highest-ranking backup plugin with millions of currently active installs. The plugin allows you to back up your files and database into the cloud and then restore them when needed with just a single click. The plugin is compatible with several cloud storage services, including Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud, Openstack Swift, UpdraftVault and others.
Elementor – Page Builder
Elementor has been around since mid-2016, but it has evolved over the years and continues to woo users. The plugin allows you to add layout, advanced styling and design elements to your WordPress content theme. This page builder is easy to use and can create gorgeous pages within a matter of minutes. You can choose from professionally designed webpage templates or design custom ones from scratch. The Elementor Pro version comes with additional features like new widgets, theme builder, dynamic content, popup builder, advanced style options and more.
Akismet – Spam Blocker
If you are running a website, using an anti-spam plugin is critical. Without it, your website can be attacked by malicious attacks and cause your website’s ranking to drop. Created by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, Akismet is a spam filtering plugin that filters spam from the comment section and contact forms. The plugin is easy to set up and help catch spam comments before they land on your moderation queue. You can focus your energy on moderating the comments by real users.
It is impossible to run a successful WordPress website without adding plugins. Whether you are looking to add social sharing buttons, email opt-in forms, or optimize the images on your website, there is a plugin for just about anything you need for your website. If you are overwhelmed with which plugin you should add first, the above list should help you get a good start.
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